I Zingari Founded — The First Wandering Amateur Club, July 1845

Country-house cricket — gentlemen's elevens visiting one another's estates for a weekend of cricket and entertainment — had been informal until the 1840s. I Zingari formalised the practice by creating a permanent club identity that could field a team anywhere on a fortnight's notice.

The four founders were friends from Cambridge who had begun to think during their last term that the post-university cricket calendar lacked an equivalent of the universities. The Blenheim Hotel dinner of 4 July 1845 was the formal foundation.

The founding members were William Bolland, Frederick and Spencer Ponsonby (later Ponsonby-Fane), and J.L. Baldwin — all recently down from Cambridge, all with country-house connections. They envisaged a club that would have no ground of its own but would tour the great country houses of England playing matches against local clubs. The name 'I Zingari' (from the Italian for 'gypsies') captured the wandering ethos. The club's colours — black, red and gold, said to represent 'out of darkness, through fire, into light' — were adopted at the foundation meeting. Membership was strictly amateur and by invitation. The club's first season included matches at the country houses of Holkham (Norfolk), Bretby (Derbyshire) and Hatfield (Hertfordshire); within five years it was playing 30 matches a season at country houses across England, Scotland and Ireland. I Zingari was the first wandering club; many imitations followed (Free Foresters in 1856, Quidnuncs from Cambridge, Authentics from Oxford) and the country-house circuit remained at the heart of amateur English cricket until the First World War.

“Out of darkness, through fire, into light.”

I Zingari continued through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; it played its last regular fixture list in the 1980s but still organises occasional matches today. The country-house circuit it pioneered grew to dominate amateur cricket until the First World War.